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Doctoral students’ ill-being in terms of stress, exhaustion and high levels of mental health problems has been well documented. Yet, the well-being of doctoral students is more than the absence of these negative symptoms. The number of studies exploring the combination of positive and negative attributes of doctoral students’ well-being is limited. Therefore, this study aims to focus on exploring individual variation in doctoral students’ experienced engagement and burnout across two distinct socio-cultural contexts in Finland and in South Africa.

A total of 884 doctoral students from Finland (n = 391) and South Africa (n = 493) responded to the cross-cultural Doctoral Experience Survey. The data were quantitatively analyzed.

Altogether four distinctive engagement–burnout profiles were detected, including engaged, engaged–exhausted, moderately engaged–burnout and burnout profiles. Differences between the Finnish and South African students were identified in profile emphasis. The profiles were also related to several study progress attributes such as drop-out intentions, time-to-candidacy and satisfaction with study.

This study provides new understanding on doctoral students’ well-being by focusing on both positive and negative attributes and exploring doctoral students’ discrepant profiles with a cross-country design.

This paper aims to investigate the production of accounting doctorates in South Africa during the period from 2008 to 2014. The investigation was prompted by calls to qualify more academics at the doctoral level, bearing in mind that postgraduate supervision forms part of an academic’s core teaching responsibilities.

This archival study uses data obtained from the institutional repositories of four research-intensive universities in South Africa to construct a profile of the accounting doctoral theses produced.

Overall, the findings indicate a move towards the international requirement for doctoral-qualified accounting academics, implying an increased research orientation in South African university accounting departments. Some of the detail findings follow: most doctorates were produced at the University of Cape Town and the University of Pretoria. The accounting fields of taxation and financial management produced the most doctorates. Almost 50 per cent of the doctorates went to members of staff. Further, 28 per cent of the doctorates went to students with the CA(SA) professional qualification. The use of the PhD by publication format is growing. The low quantity of PhDs produced can possibly be explained by the low numbers of PhD qualified professorial staff who can act as supervisors. Lastly, the accounting doctorates analysed in this paper were longer and supervised by more people than the typical commerce faculty doctorate.

Not all South African universities were included in the study and therefore some accounting doctorates might have been excluded. In addition, accounting education doctorates, possibly supervised in faculties of education, would also be excluded in view of the approach followed in this paper, which was to identify accounting doctorates via departments and commerce faculties.

This article is the first of its kind to examine the accounting doctorates produced in South Africa since Van der Schyf’s (2008) call for the establishment of a research culture in the accounting departments of South African universities. As such, this paper makes an important contribution towards how such a research culture may be enhanced through cultivating doctoral education in this context.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework for conceptualizing critical and creative thinking within doctoral study and to illuminate the connecting and diverging points between the two phenomena in a way that clarifies their developmental relationships.

The conceptual framework is founded in a synthesized understanding of both new and established theories on critical and creative thinking, and worked out through a reconstruction and expanded re‐conceptualization of the Four C Model of Creativity.

The results show that responsible scholars are moved by both critical and creative thinking, which is conceptualized as critical creativity. The authors introduce the ECC‐model which illustrates how different Expressions of Critical Creativity (CC) is manifested in scholarship: Experiential CC (in cognition), Experimental CC (in action), Enunciated CC (in speech), and Eulogized CC (in recognition). Whereas Experiential, Experimental and Enunciated CC constitute important fields of developmental practice in doctoral education, Eulogized CC is a possible outcome of the completed doctorate. It appears that Enunciated CC especially seems to be a field of urgent need for further development.

The paper offers a conceptual framework for new ways of understanding critical creativity in doctoral education by outlining how critical creativity is manifested in an educational context. Thereby the authors provide a valuable tool for supporting doctoral students in becoming professional scholars through a pedagogy that is reflective, integrative and deliberate.